Almost 2,000 doses of COVID-19 The vaccine was pampered at a veterans’ hospital in Boston after a contractor accidentally disconnected a freezer, hospital officials said Thursday. Staff at Jamaica Plain VA Medical Center discovered Tuesday that a freezer had failed, compromising 1,900 doses of Modern COVID-19 vaccine.
The freezer plug was found to have loosened after a contractor accidentally unplugged it during cleaning, according to a statement from Kyle Toto, a spokesman for VA Boston Healthcare System. The freezer had been in a safe place and had an alarm system, he said.
Modern and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines require extremely cold temperatures for storage.
“It’s 12 hours for the Moderna vaccine. Once it’s been at room temperature for a long time, you can’t make sure it’s effective and therefore you can’t administer the vaccine,” said Dr. Paul Biddinger, medical director for training. Emergency General Brigham, told CBS Boston.
The system is investigating the cause of the incident and why the monitoring alarm system did not work. There are several doses, Toto said, and officials “do not anticipate disrupting” the system’s vaccination efforts.
Temperature problems have caused problems with the launch of vaccines in other states.
Nearly 12,000 Moderna doses shipped to Michigan on Sunday were altered after it got too cold. In Wisconsin, a the pharmacist faces charges after authorities say he deliberately destroyed hundreds of doses, taking them out of the fridge for two nights.
The Moderna vaccine should be stored at normal freezer temperatures, but not at the ultra-cold required for the Pfizer-BioNTech shot.
CBS Boston reports that Massachusetts Representative Stephen Lynch said the doses have been moved to Brockton and West Roxbury while the cleanup is still underway.
“We just think it was an accident,” Lynch told reporters on Friday. “Part of the contributing factor was how these outlets work. One of them is an offset, so it’s very difficult to extract. But the one at the top of the freezer was a direct traction, so the engineering staff here they corrected this.They created a parenthesis, took pictures with that plug and sent it to all the other hospitals in the VA that have this thermo-scientific freezer, so that if it could happen in another part. “